


It Was Like I Knew You

by llrstyb



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 15:01:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6961831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/llrstyb/pseuds/llrstyb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sorry to bother you, it’s just…we’ve met once before, have we not?” Bucky asked, voice a little nervous.</p>
<p>“Yeah,” Steve clears his throat. “Yeah I guess you could say that.”</p>
<p>“Oh.” A pause, then, “Could you tell me about it? About the time we met.”</p>
<p>Steve hesitated for a moment. Their story – happy childhoods; World War II; the Winter Soldier. All of it was on the tip of his tongue, just waiting to erupt, but all Steve said was, “It was just once. In passing.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Was Like I Knew You

As soon as he saw Bucky’s eyes spot him at the outdoor patio of the café they’d both been sitting at, Steve realized he made a grave mistake. He shouldn’t have gotten this close. Stupid! So stupid, he berated himself. He’d just wanted to see Bucky up close at least once. And he figured he would be safe from recognition. Bucky had lost him memory three months earlier.

Like a train wreck that he saw coming but couldn’t stop, he saw as Bucky got up and moved in the direction of Steve’s table. His heart started hammering away, and his palms became incredibly sweaty.

“Sorry to bother you, it’s just…we’ve met once before, have we not?” Bucky asked, voice a little nervous.

“Yeah,” Steve clears his throat. “Yeah I guess you could say that.”

“Oh.” A pause, then, “Could you tell me about it? About the time we met.”

Steve hesitated for a moment. Their story – happy childhoods; World War II; the Winter Soldier. All of it was on the tip of his tongue, just waiting to erupt, but all Steve said was, “It was just once. In passing.”

“Are you certain? I’m sorry, it’s just that…Well, this is going to sound strange, but I think that I’ve met you before.”

“Yeah, like I said. We met once in passing. I- I bumped into you, apologized, and then we went our way.”

Bucky’s brows were scrunched up in confusion as if he was trying to find a missing piece of a puzzle that just wasn’t there.

“No. I mean like a…” Bucky stumbled over his words for a minute and looked down as he said, “like an intimate meeting.” Blood colored his cheeks.

The words were painful to get out, the blatant lie of them. “I can assure you. We have never once been intimate.”

There was an awkward, stuffy pause. “Right. Yeah. Of course.” Bucky said, no longer being able to meet his eyes. “You must think I’m a total creep now.”

“No. not at all,” Steve said so quietly; it was almost a whisper. And then louder he said while quickly getting out of his seat. The now cold coffee forgotten on the table. “Well, I um, have to go. Important meeting.” He could feel Bucky’s gaze burn into his back as he started walking away. Regretting the decision as soon as he thought it, Steve slightly turned his head around and saw the quiet longing and confusion in Bucky’s eyes. Steeling himself, he walked away from that look.

 

 

 

Natasha looked at him with something like pity in her eyes. “Is it really necessary? To lie to him like that?”

“I’m not lying. He’s the one who forgot.”

She was about to say something else, no doubt about how it’s not right to keep him in the dark, how he deserves to know when Steve cut her off.

“Look, you have no idea how sorry I am towards him. The only thing that I want to do is run to him and hug him and tell him how much I love him.” He took a steadying breath “But I can’t. Don’t you think there’s a reason he forgot? All that trauma, all that pain. He was tortured. He was brainwashed. And this went on and on, Nat. For fucking decades!” Natasha’s eyes widened. Steve rarely ever cussed. “And I did nothing. I could do nothing.”

“Even you can’t be dense enough to think that that was your fault.” Steve said nothing to that.

After taking a deep breath, Steve shook his head in resolution and in that moment Natasha knew there was nothing she could say to change his stubborn mind.

“I’m doing this for him. He deserves to have peace in his life. Subconsciously he must have known that. Look I’m not an expert, but his mind must have repressed all of those memories to protect himself. If I go barging back in with my declarations of love and if I tell him about us – about how we met and how we lived and loved and how we fought side by side in a war that has been over for seventy years…No, I could never do that. I’m not that selfish.”

“Okay,” was Natasha’s only response.

“He forgot. And to everything that is good in this world, I will be thankful for that for the rest of my life.”

 

 **********

_“Shhhh.” Bucky whispered, eyes crinkling with light and happiness, and a smile so beautiful and bright. “We have to be quiet. The walls aren’t that thick.”_

_He traced his hand over Steve’s prominent cheekbones and up to his soft blonde hair. Steve, with his bony frame, sighed in content. Bucky scooted closer and leaned in to place a gentle kiss to Steve’s lips. The bed creaked in response and both of them, with youthful excitement, still untouched by all the tragedy that will one day befall them, laughed._

 **********

  

It wasn’t that hard, Steve mused. It wasn’t that hard to forget Bucky, not at all. He figured out the trick to it. In the beginning, he tried to distract himself. Whenever thoughts of Bucky, whenever that deep ache started to manifest itself again, whenever tears began to prickle his eyes, and he felt like he couldn’t breathe, Steve always tried to think of ways to get it off his mind. But that didn’t work.

The trick turned out to be to let himself miss Bucky so much that it overwhelmed him, left his heart a gnawing piece of brutalized tissue. He drowned himself in that pain. And his mind, it couldn’t deal with so much heartbreak, so it tricked Steve. It told him, _this pain, it’s fine. It’s just a part of who you are now_. The pain molded itself to him and so he no longer ever had to miss Bucky, ever even had to think about him, because in that everlasting suffering, Bucky always existed.

He never checked up on him. At least, not personally. He asked Sam, sometimes Natasha, to keep an eye on him, to tell Steve how he’s doing. They asked him if he wanted to know where Bucky currently lived. Steve said no. It was easier that way, he said, when they looked at him with that pity again. They told him that Bucky was doing okay. That he seems somewhat happy, if maybe a little reserved. “Doesn’t appear to have any friends,” Sam added. The wound of pain that had become a part of him inflamed at those words. “Oh,” is all he replied. He didn’t want to think of Bucky all alone out there.

It went on like that for two years. Natasha and Sam keeping tabs on Bucky for Steve. Sometimes, when they saw the dark shadows of exhaustion brought on by sadness under Steve’s eyes, they brought up with forced casualness, that maybe it was time to bring Bucky back. All Steve said was no.

 

 **********

_“I love you; you know that right.” Bucky was looking into his eyes; his thumb was gently tracing Steve's chin._

_“Of course.”_

_“Whatever happens, just know that you’ll always have me.”_

_“Aw, come on Buck, stop that. You can’t promise something like that.”_

_“’Course, I can. I promise you, I will always be there for you.” Bucky said, the urge to kiss Steve a physical need. But he couldn’t. Not in public. They were already too close as was, with Bucky’s hand cradling Steve’s face. “Besides, who else is gonna get your skinny ass out of all the fights, you get yourself into?”_

_**********_

 

The sharp noise of his cellphone penetrated the quiet of the room, and Steve blinked as if coming out of a haze. He looked at the clock and realized that he’d been sitting there for a long time, just staring at the window. He’d been doing that a lot these days, him and the quiet ache in his chest that’s long ago turned into numbness, sitting for hours on end, eyes focused only on one point. There but not really there.

“Hello,” he said.

“Steve.” It was Natasha. She sounded worried. Instantly, Steve was in battle mode.

“What happened? Was there an attack? Where? I’ll be there as soon as possible.”

“No. Steve, listen. There’s…” she hesitated for a moment. “We can’t find Bucky.”

For a second, he stood frozen, not understanding. “What do you mean you can’t find him. Last week you told me he was fine. That he seemed to be getting better and adjusting.”

“Yes. And now we can’t find him,” she paused. “I’m sorry Steve. Sam is at the apartment where he lives. He’s trying to see if there’s a lead he can find.”

“Where is that? I’ll be there as soon as I ca-” He broke off mid-sentence when he saw who was standing in the middle of his living room.

“Steve?”

“Huh?” he answered distractedly. “Nat, listen I’m going to need to call you back later. I- I think I found him.”

He hung up and dropped the phone to the ground, his hands trembling.

Unable to say anything, Steve continued to stare at the man who broke into his house. His hair was still long. His eyes were grim and angry.

“You should be more careful Captain. Anyone could get it.” Bucky took a step closer. “Like the Winter Soldier, for example.”

The part of Steve that had gone numb the past two years was now screaming and shrieking and trying to twist itself out of his stomach. “Bucky.”

“How could you do it?” There’s such palpable fury and hurt in his eyes. “You lied to me. You saw me that day, and you lied to my face.”

He continued to stare at Steve, who seemed to have lost all ability to speak. He started circling the now too small, too suffocating room. “ _We met once, in passing_.” He mimicked Steve. “And, of course, my favorite, _we have never once been intimate_.”

He was now standing so close to Steve that their noses were almost touching. Steve, whose every atom of being was burning, glanced at Bucky’s lips.

“Tell me, what do you consider intimate, then? Hmm,” Bucky leaned in impossibly close. “If everything that we have done has failed to make it into that category.”

Eyes taking in all of Bucky, not believing that he was standing in front of him, Steve said, “You’re angry.” His mind was overwhelmed and he was feeling faint and said the first thing that passed his mind.

"Wow, nothing escapes your notice, huh Captain.”

“I’m sorry, Bucky.” Steve stepped back - the proximity was overwhelming. “I did it because-”

“Spare me the details, Rogers. I know why you did it.” He glanced down and stepped back. “I get it, you know. Having to deal with a freak like me couldn’t have been fun. Wanting to forget about me and live the glamorous life with the Avengers. I don’t blame you. Or at least I’m trying not to. It just, it hurt, when it all came back to me. I was sitting in my little apartment when suddenly all these memories started pouring back. And I remembered you.”

It took him a second to process what Bucky just said, and when he did, Steve’s head shot up and he looked at Bucky with hurt in his eyes. “How dare you,” He said, softly but enraged. “How dare you think that I did it because I wanted to- wanted to leave you. Are you kidding me?” He knew he was in the wrong; he knew he should be begging forgiveness, but Bucky’s words, his belief that he meant so little to Steve, infuriated him like nothing much else could.

“What did you want me to do?” Steve continued, almost pleading. “You found a way out, don’t you get it. You had a way out of this madness and pain and how was I supposed to ruin that for you? How was I expected to look at you and try to make you remember all the misery you’ve undergone? How?”

Steve was heaving, the dull ache that he’d learned to deal with was coming back in full force. “I was doing it for your own good. I wanted you to have a chance at a healthy, happy life. Even though it was—painful. I was trying to do right by you, Buck, something I haven’t done in a long, long time."

There was a long, stiff second where Bucky just stood with his eyes glaring at Steve, contemplating something.

“Oh.” All the anger seemed to evaporate out of Bucky in one second. “Oh. You idiot,” he said with relief in his voice, and once again stepped closer, cradling Steve’s head in his own hand, thumb messaging over his chin, as he had so, so many years ago.

He kissed Steve; this time having to look up slightly at him to do it and remembered all the times they’d done this before. The first time. Young. Breathless. Scared and giddy. The second time. Passionate. Mad. Wild. Lust filled. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, until they stopped keeping track, kissing anywhere and everywhere they could find a private moment. Then the war happened, and when Steve found Bucky on the torture table, he pressed their foreheads together, and gently, tenderly pressed a kiss to his forehead. After that, after knowing what being without each other was like, their kisses become more drawn out as if they were savoring each other.

And now this kiss. They were both terrified and apprehensive. They were not the same they once were, far too broken, with far too many scars. And yet, the kiss was the same. Just as exciting as the first, as intense as the ones before the war, and as appreciative as the ones after.

 “You’re an idiot, Steve because I wasn’t happy. Not by a long shot.”

 Steve stepped back, forehead scrunching up in concern. “What? But why? You’d gotten a fresh beginning.”

“Because you weren’t there.”

“But you couldn’t even remember me.”

“No, but I remembered a feeling. Happiness. Fulfillment. I saw flashes of blond hair. Flashes of what I now realize was our little room. I remembered how it felt to have your mouth on me and your hands tracing my skin. I remembered a lot, and it left me feeling miserable because I didn’t have it anymore, and I didn’t know where to look to find it. And I saw you that day, and it was like I knew you, and you were staring at me with this mysterious expression on your face, but then you just ran away.”

Steve exhaled in disbelief. “I really am an idiot, huh.”

In response, Bucky just kissed him harder.

When they finally disentangled, because even they needed oxygen, Steve asked, “So what now?”

Bucky looked unsure for a minute, but then squared his shoulders, looked him straight in the eyes and said. “I have been without you for too long, and I know that the, um, Winter Soldier thing might pose a bit of a problem, but I want to be with you, in whatever way I can. I love you.”

Not once since his awakening in the 21st Century, had Steve felt as happy as he did after hearing those words. Nodding his head, Steve said, voice shaky with emotion, “I love you, too, so much. You have no idea how many nights I spent dreaming of this exact moment.” Wrapping his arms around Bucky and burying his face in the crook of his neck, he continued, “I’m not letting you out of my sight again. Never again.” 


End file.
